The History and Science of the Manhattan Project, 2nd ed.

553 Pages·2019·14.08 MB·English

by  Bruce Cameron Reed

Undergraduate Lecture Notes in Physics
Bruce Cameron Reed
The History
and Science of
the Manhattan
Project
Second Edition
Undergraduate Lecture Notes in Physics
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Neil Ashby, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO, USA
WilliamBrantley,DepartmentofPhysics,FurmanUniversity,Greenville,SC,USA
MatthewDeady,PhysicsProgram,BardCollege,Annandale-on-Hudson,NY,USA
Michael Fowler, Department of Physics, University of Virginia, Charlottesville,
VA, USA
Morten Hjorth-Jensen, Department of Physics, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway
Michael Inglis, Department of Physical Sciences, SUNY Suffolk County
Community College, Selden, NY, USA
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Bruce Cameron Reed
The History and Science
of the Manhattan Project
Second Edition
123
Bruce CameronReed
Department ofPhysics
AlmaCollege
Alma, MI,USA
ISSN 2192-4791 ISSN 2192-4805 (electronic)
Undergraduate Lecture Notesin Physics
ISBN978-3-662-58174-2 ISBN978-3-662-58175-9 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-58175-9
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This work is dedicated to Laurie.
You will always be The One.
Preface
In August, 1945, two United States Army Air Force B-29 bombers each dropped
single bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These new
“atomic” bombs, known colloquially as Little Boy and Fat Man, each exploded
with energies equivalent to over ten thousand tons of conventional explosive, the
normal payload of 1000 such bombers deployed simultaneously. Hiroshima and
Nagasaki were both devastated. A few days later, Japan surrendered, bringing an
end to World War II. In a speech to his people on August 15, Emperor Hirohito
specifically referred to “a new and most cruel bomb” as one of the reasons for
accepting surrender terms that had been laid out by the Allied powers. A later
analysisbytheUnitedStatesStrategicBombingSurveyestimatedthetotalnumber
of people killed in the bombings to be about 125,000, with a further 130,000–
160,000 injured.
While historians continue to debate whether the bombs can be credited with
directly ending the war or simply helped to hasten its end, it is irrefutable that the
developmentanduseofnuclearweaponswereawatershedeventofhumanhistory.
In 1999, the Newseum organization of Washington, D.C., conducted a survey of
journalists and the public regarding the top 100 news stories of the twentieth
century. Number one on the list for both groups was the bombings of Hiroshima
andNagasakiandtheendofWorldWarII.JournalistsrankedtheJuly,1945,testof
an atomic bomb in the desert of southern New Mexico as number 48, and the
Manhattan Project itself, the U.S. Army’s effort under which the bombs were
developed,asnumber64.TheManhattanProjectwasthemostcomplexandcostly
national-level research and development project to its time, and its legacy is
enormous: America’s postwar military and political power, the cold war and the
nuclear arms race, the thousands of nuclear weapons still held in the arsenals of
various countries, the possibility of their proliferation to other states, the threat of
nuclear terrorism, and public apprehension with radiation and nuclear energy all
originatedwiththeProject.Theselegacieswillremainwithusfordecadestocome.
vii
viii Preface
The development of nuclear weapons is the subject of literally thousands of
booksandarticles,manyofthemcarefullyresearchedandwell-written.Why,then,
do I believe that the world needs one more volume on a topic that has been so
exhaustively explored?
Source material on the Manhattan Project can be classed into four very broad
categories. First, there are many synoptic semipopular histories. This genre began
with William Laurence’s Dawn over Zero (1946) and Stephane Groueff’s 1967
Manhattan Project: The Untold Story of the Making of the Atomic Bomb. The
current outstanding example of this type of work is Richard Rhodes’ The Making
of the Atomic Bomb (1986); references to a number of others appear in the
“Resource Letters” by myself cited in the Further Reading list at the end of this
section. Second are works prepared as official government and military histories,
primarily for academic scholars. The original source along this line was Henry
DeWolf Smyth’s Atomic Energy for Military Purposes, which was written under
War Department auspices and released just after the bombings of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki. More extensive later exemplars are Hewlett and Anderson’s A History
of the United States Atomic Energy Commission and Vincent Jones’ United States
Army in World War II: Special Studies—Manhattan: The Army and the Atomic
Bomb. Third are the numerous biographies on the leading personalities of the
Project,particularlysomeofthescientistsinvolved.Welloveradozenbiographies
have been published on Robert Oppenheimer alone. Finally, there are specialized
technical publications which require readers to be armed with some upper-
undergraduate or graduate-level physics and Allied sciences to appreciate fully.
Synoptic volumes are accessible to a broad audience, but tend to be limited in
theextentoftheirtechnicalcoverage.Interestingastheyare,onecanreadthesame
stories only so many times; eventually, a curious reader must yearn for deeper
knowledge:Whycanonlyuraniumorplutoniumbeusedtomakeafissionweapon?
Howdoesonecomputeacriticalmass?Howwasplutonium,whichdoesnotoccur
naturally,created?Officialhistoriesaresuperblywell-documented,butalsotendto
be non-technical; they are not meant to serve as student texts or popularly acces-
sible treatments. Biographies are not usually written to address technical matters,
but here a different issue can creep in. While many biographies are responsible
treatments of the life and work of the individual concerned, others devolve into
questionablepsychologicalorsociologicalanalysesofeventsandmotivationsnow
decadesinthepast,where,notinconveniently,theprincipalshavenoopportunityto
respond. Some of the synoptic-level treatments fall prey to this affliction as well.
The bottom line is that after many years of teaching a college-level general
education course on the Manhattan Project, I came to the conclusion that a need
existsforabroadlycomprehensibleoverviewoftheProjectpreparedbyaphysicist
familiarwithbothitsscienceandhistory.Mygoalhasbeentotrytofindamiddle
ground by preparing a volume that can serve as a text for a college-level science
course at a basic algebra level, but which is accessible to non-students and
non-specialists who wish to learn about the Project. To this end, most chapters in
this volume comprise a mixture of descriptive and technical material. For
Preface ix
technically oriented readers, exercises are included at the ends of some chapters.
Forreaderswhoprefertoskipovermathematicaltreatmentsoftechnicaldetails,the
text clearly indicates where descriptive passages resume.
Another motivation for taking on this project is that, over time, access to sen-
sitive informationregarding historicallyimportant events inevitablybecomesmore
open.Atthiswriting,almost75yearshaveelapsedsincetheSmythReport,over55
havepassedsincethepublicationofHewlettandAnderson’sNewWorld,andover
30 since Rhodes’ Making of the Atomic Bomb. In the meantime, a considerable
number of technical and non-technical publications on the Project have appeared,
and many more original documents are readily available than was the case when
those authors were preparing their works. From both a personal professional per-
spective and an access-to-information viewpoint, the time seemed right to prepare
this volume.
Writing about decades-old events is a double-edged sword. Because we know
how the story played out, hindsight can be perfect. We know which theories and
experiments worked and which did not. The flip side of this is that it becomes far
too easy to overlook false starts and blind alleys and set out the story in a linear
this–then–that sequence that gives it all a sense of predetermined inevitability. But
thiswouldnotgiveaduesenseofthechallengesfacedbythepeopleinvolvedwith
the Project, so many aspects of which were so chancy that the entire effort could
just as well have played no role in ending the war. After the discovery of nuclear
fission, it took some of the leading research personalities of the time well over a
year to appreciate how the subtleties of nuclear reactions might be exploited to
makeaweaponorareactor.Evenaftertheoreticalargumentsandexperimentaldata
began to become clear, technological barriers to practical realization of nuclear
energylookedsooverwhelmingastomaketheideaofanuclearweaponseemmore
appropriatetotherealmofsciencefictionthantoreal-worldengineering.Physicist
andNobelLaureateNielsBohrwasoftheopinionthat“itcanneverbedoneunless
you turn the United States into one huge factory.” To some extent, that is exactly
what was done. Again, my goal has been to seek a middle ground which gives
readers some sense of the details and evolution of events, but without being
overwhelming.
ThescaleoftheManhattanProjectwassogreatthatnosingle-volumehistoryof
it can ever hope to be fully comprehensive. After the Project came under Army
auspices in mid-1942, it split into a number of parallel components which subse-
quently proceeded to the end of the war. This parallelism obviates a strict
chronological telling of the story; each main component deserves its own chapter.
Thousandsofotherpublicationsonthistopicexistpreciselybecausemanyofthose
components are worthy of detailed analyses in their own right. Thus, the present
volume should be thought of as a gateway to an intricate, compelling story, after
whichan interested readercanexploreany numberoffascinatingsubplots inmore
depth.
It is mysincere hope that you will enjoy, learn from, and seriously reflect upon
the science and history that unfold on the following pages. I hope also that they
whetyourappetiteformore.SourcesofinformationontheProjectaresoextensive
x Preface
thatasingleindividualcanhopetolookatbutafewpercentofitall;Ihavedevoted
over two decades of my professional career to studying the Manhattan Project and
know that I still have much to learn. The future will need more scientists and
historianstoserveasManhattanProjectscholars.Tostudentsreadingthesewords,I
invite you to consider making such work a part of your own career.
Remarks on the Second Edition
ThissecondeditionofTheHistoryandScienceoftheManhattanProjecthasbeen
preparedinresponsetothemanyinsightfulcommentsIreceivedonthefirstedition
from readers who took the time to contact me. The most significant additions
concern the provision of an extensive index and a new chapter on the wartime
German nuclear program. The latter is Chap. 9 in this edition; the former Chap. 9,
“The Legacy of Manhattan,” is now Chap. 10. When I prepared the first edition, I
opted to not include such a chapter on the rationale that the German program was
not a component of the Manhattan Project per se. However, the terrifying possi-
bilityofaNazinuclearweaponwasthestimulusforManhattan,andIhavecometo
the realization that adding this material gives a more complete picture of the rel-
evant history. As with the first edition, I make no comments on the very nascent
Japanese nuclear program.
Also new is Sect. 6.7, which reviews the Feed Materials Program of the
Manhattan Engineer District. Without a reliable supply of tons of uranium ore to
feedtheuraniumenrichment andplutonium productionfacilities atOakRidgeand
Hanford, the entire Manhattan Project would never have existed. Smaller but still
important changes include more details on background experiments to Enrico
Fermi’sCP-1reactor(Chap.5);JapaneseballoonbombsatHanford(Chap.6);why
onlyU-235andPu-239areviableasbombfuels(Chap.7);therelationshipbetween
Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill on atomic matters (Chap. 7); the pro-
duction of polonium for use in neutron-generating bomb triggers (also Chap. 7);
some revised data on plans for the late-1945 invasion of Japan (Chap. 8); and
updates to current nuclear weapons deployments and the status of the Manhattan
ProjectNationalHistoricalPark(nowChap.10).Afewfiguresthatappearedinthe
first edition have been dropped to make way for some of these additions.
A number of readers, particularly John Altholz, Michael Magras, Robert
Sadlowe, and Arthur Tassel, contacted me with corrections and valuable sugges-
tions for clarifications of some of the more technical material. They and others
obviously spent many hours poring over the first edition, and I am humbled and
honored by their attention.